"Hashgachah Pratit"

 

My stepdaughter started college classes this week and it took me back to my own parental liberation. Mine came in stages…having returned from the highly structured and rigid basic military training and technical school, my real launching came as I loaded up my car to travel to my first duty assignment in Colorado. Having said my goodbyes, I began the trek with an avalanche of emotions, and by the time I hit the interstate, I was bawling my eyes out. “This is really it” I admitted.

We all remember the transition to supposed “adult” status post high school graduation, now knowing full well that we were far from being grown-up…and yet, perhaps the most noticeable change at that time of our lives was the drop off in parental supervision. Such is the case in my home…while my daughter still lives with us, she now lives a life of “on my own.”

Do you recall your own rite of passage, being launched into the world of self-reliance? We learned quickly then that the freedom we sought for so long didn’t feel so free, as we faced the future of self-care. When you’re out from under the protective wing of caregivers, somehow the early quest for freedom retrospectively feels a bit hasty.

As adults, we typically think fondly of childhood days spent under the supervision of our parents or caregivers. We assess those times as care-free and unencumbered. Any teenager would argue that perspective and yet, the more distance we gain from adolescence, the more we engage in “retrospective sense-making,” or reinterpreting our past to fit our current life paradigm. In any event, the aspect of being cared for or supervised is often something we long for as we face adult pressures, decisions, and expectations from others.

The Fatherhood of our God is interpreted differently with folks. And while it’s almost cliché to say that we typically relate to God the Father in similar fashion to our experience with our earthly fathers, it becomes vitally important to understand the difference between the two. On one hand, we can hide behind the effect our dad’s had on us, and project that onto our Abba…angry dad, absent dad, demanding dad…but what is the reality?

“Hashgachah pratit” is the Hebrew phrase that answers that question. It refers to God’s personal supervision of our lives. Hashgachah means “supervision” and pratit means “individual” or “particular.” There are stark implications to this understanding of Abba’s involvement in our lives. He is not distant; He is at hand. He wants to engage with us. He is interested in the minutiae of our experiences. He is not rageful, disengaged, or rigid with us, regardless of our day-to-day decisions. As one teacher put it, “God does not have a communication problem.” He is ready to speak to us, lead us, encourage us.

Consider the words of Yeshua: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock.” If we accept the fact that God is personally supervising our lives, it stands to reason that He is always standing at the door, waiting for us to open it. Truth be told, I can think of many times I purposefully shut the door in His face in order to sin intentionally and then typically kept the door shut for a period of time, acting as if He was not there…but nothing could be further from the truth. When prodigal me reopened the door, I was expecting a rod, but received an embrace.

The more we allow ourselves to be aware of His personal, intimate supervision, the more we dwell there, the more we engage with Him. “Try Me in this,” He offers. Keep the door open today haverim, and walk with the One who not only fashioned you and is intimately acquainted with you, but who also wants you to enjoy His personal supervision. Shalom!

 

For What Do You Hope?

There is a dichotomy in Christendom. ‘The Santa Claus Syndrome’ versus ‘The Husband/Wife Paradigm.’ ‘The Life of If/Then’ versus ‘The Life of What’s Next’…

‘Hope’ is one of those words we splatter around like an artist flings paint on an avant garde piece called “The Non-Objective Abstraction of Mood.”

I ‘hope’ the Bengals win the Super Bowl…I ‘hope’ I hit the Powerball…I ‘hope’ everyone likes me all the time ever in my whole life (I think you have a better chance of hitting the Powerball).

What do most Christians hope for? Were you to survey this question to believers, no doubt you would have one overwhelming response: the hope of ‘heaven.’ And if we have a primary hope of heaven, we may be guilty of ‘The Santa Claus Syndrome.’

“You better watch out, you better not cry, you better not pout, I’m telling you why…”

As children, our caregivers often threatened us with this ‘if/then’ proposition. “If you don’t behave boy, Santa will put you on the naughty list…and then you’ll have NO presents!”

Now, while most of us would attest to the complete forgiveness of sins in Yeshua, many of us still struggle and adhere to a conditional hope based on our performance. We can’t help it! We’ve been so conditioned and live in a ‘reward for good behavior’ culture. I know this from 40 years of ‘fear-faith’…perhaps the most oxymoronic notion ever. Is fear-based faith, faith at all? If our hope is contingent on our obedience, isn’t it merely unbelief in the very gospel itself?

Were I the enemy of your soul, this would be my preferred method of bringing you to discouragement and hopelessness. “You’ve gone too far, you are hopeless, God rejects you.”

So, in what shall we hope if not heaven? Aaron Budgen speaks to the subject of our hoping, saying, “The law was designed to show us that we have no hope apart from His mercy…if our hope is based on the basis of our repentance and obedience, we are then focused on getting into heaven.” He continues, “The best we can hope for is that He will overlook our sins and we can squeak into heaven. He may not have a mansion for us but maybe a trailer in the backyard (lol)…this thinking is a belief that God still holds our sins against us.”

I believe that Budgen is right. Rather than hoping for heaven, we do well to hope in the expectation that God will show us more of who He is. The heaven issue should already be settled in our minds based on the truth of Messiah’s death and resurrection. But we are still called to hope. It is not necessary for me to hope that my wife will marry me. That has already been accomplished. However, I do hope that our relationship will mature and grow.

Similarly, our hope in Adonai involves a relational paradigm, based on what already exists, a life filled with “What’s next Abba? Would You reveal some aspect of Your nature to me today. How will You direct my steps right now? How might I bear Your fruit today?”

Knowing our Lord is the preeminent objective in our walk. Bask in His delight of you today, dear one!

“(May) the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you will abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” (Romans 15:13)